Best of Technical Support

I put a second IDE hard drive in my PC and installed Mandrake
Linux 8.0 on it. Now when I reboot, I have the dreaded “LI”
problem, i.e., LILO displays only the first two letters of the LILO
prompt. I believe the source of my problem is that I installed the
second hard drive as slave on the secondary IDE. My boot partition
(mounted as /) is hdd6.

—Frederic Mora, fmora@attglobal.net

Getting “LI” from LILO usually means that the first-stage
boot loader was able to load the second-stage boot loader but has
failed to execute it. This can either be caused by a disk's
physical configuration inconsistency or because you moved
/boot/boot.b without running the map installer. In practical terms,
you indeed need to reconfigure /etc/lilo.conf to describe where
(which disk) each partition is on your system. So, you need to
reboot your system from a rescue disk and get into a root prompt so
you can edit lilo.conf and point each element to where it is
physically located (in accordance to the way your disks are
identified: /dev/hdaX, /dev/hdbY, /dev/hddZ, etc.). After editing
/etc/lilo.conf, run /sbin/lilo -v to write all
to the disks and reboot. Look at the page
www.fan.nb.ca/~aa126/troubleshoot-LILO.html
for additional information on LILO.

—Felipe E. Barousse Boué, fbarousse@piensa.com

wu-ftp Won't Let Users in

I'm having some problems with logging on to the FTP server in
my company. I've installed wu-ftpd and anonyftp to the server. The
guest account has been created, but all the users are not able to
log on to the FTP server. I'm sure that the password is
correct.

—Alan Lim, alan_lim@astro.com.my

Check the log files in /var/log to see if they are telling
you anything. You can use the -d flag in conjunction with wu-ftpd
to increase the amount of logging. If you compiled the FTP
dæmon yourself, check to see whether it is having problems
with PAM or shadow passwords. It may not be sensing that this is
required during the compile process. Please note that, in any case,
this is a huge security risk.
wu-ftpd is not designed to execute
the chroot() function for normal user logins, meaning normal
(nonanonymous) users will be able to access the entire system once
they log in. You might want to consider fixing both issues at the
same time by installing a more secure FTP dæmon such as
ProFTPD or NcFTPD and configuring them to chroot() to the user's
home directory.

—Chad Robinson, crobinson@rfgonline.com

Alan, please make sure that the shell account used with those
users is listed in the wu-ftp configuration. Otherwise it will deny
access even if the password is correct.

—Mario Neto, mneto@argo.com.br

I Have No Source and I Must make

I have installed or attempted to install almost every
distribution available. The best install I have found is Mandrake
7.0, 7.1 and 7.2. The problem I have is I cannot get source code to
install when I do configure. The system either
gives me a syntax error or some file is missing. I've read all the
read files, I have several books and I still can't find out what's
wrong.

—Bill York, bill_york@pipeline.com

You should be able to install source files (such as the Linux
kernel source) with RPM; just mount the source CD,
cd to the directory containing the source RPMs,
and use

rpm -i kernel-source-file.rpm

That should do it. Installing with RPM (in the case
of Mandrake) is fairly easy, and it also takes care of most
dependencies on other files. If you still get an error, then you
probably need to install some other stuff before the actual file
you are trying to install.

—Felipe E. Barousse Boué, fbarousse@piensa.com

Ignoring BOOTP Requests

I recently set up a DHCP server, and when I monitor the port
I am seeing BOOTP requests that come from an old VAX system that
gets its boot information from a machine on the other side of our
router. Is there something I can turn off on my Linux box or
configure to ignore those requests?

—Pat Derosa, pderosa@ap.org

Are the BOOTP requests actually causing problems or are they
merely an annoyance in your log files? The ISC DHCP dæmon
allows you to use the deny bootp option to ignore BOOTP clients,
but that may not stop the server from logging the request. In that
case, you may have limited options. You may be stuck with the
message unless you are comfortable locating the line in the source
code, commenting it out and recompiling the dæmon.

—Chad Robinson, crobinson@rfgonline.com

If you don't have “allow unknown-clients”, your DHCP server
will not serve requests to machines that aren't explicitly listed
by MAC address. Also, if you omit dynamic-bootp, your DHCP server
will not serve bootp requests.